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TwobyTwo writes "Yesterday, Slashdot posted a piece titled Who Really Invented the Internet?. It quoted a Wall Street Journal article with the same title by Gordon Crovitz. Crovitz makes the claim that government research did not play a key role in driving the invention of the Internet, giving credit instead to Xerox PARC. Unfortunately, Crovitz' article is wrong on many specific points, and he's also wrong in his key conclusion about the government's role. In a wonderful piece in the LA Times Michael Hiltzik corrects the record. Hiltzik, who is the author of an excellent book about PARC called Dealers of Lightning, makes clear that government funded research was indeed the foundation for the Internet's success."

Government is good for funding basic R&D and jumpstarting new technology and ideas. But then it should step out of the way, and handover the task to thousands of private businesses in the open market, rather than continue to hold a monopoly.

The internet is an example of a well-managed government project where the government stepped-aside when the time was right. (As opposed to other government projects like the Amtrak Monopoly that should have been sold to Conrail or some other profitable rail company years ago.)

Although this may seem hard for conservatives to believe, there is such a thing as a government program that does its job well: The VA, for instance, manages health care with less overhead than either private insurers or Medicare. The US Coast Guard does a great deal of lifesaving and policing while operating on a shoestring budget. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau recently published information on bad credit card companies with probably about 2-4 people (1 web developer, a webserver in a datacenter they probably already had, and a couple people to analyse the complaints).

Of course, contrary to what some liberals believe, not all government works well: DoD procurement is ridiculous ($5000 hammers aren't totally uncommon), highway projects are notoriously corrupt, and some agencies accomplish very little. But saying that all government is mismanaged is just as wrong as saying that all government is well-managed.

Not only does the VA manage health care cheaper than private industry, they do it better in terms of the results that count: keeping people healthier.

For example, the VA system does a lot of prostate cancer surgery. They just published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine (367:203 if you want to look it up) in which they found that surgery for prostate cancer (radical prostatectomy) in most cases doesn't really do any good. The price you pay is that half the men who get prostate cancer surgery wind up sexually impotent.

The VA system does a lot of research on outcomes of different treatments. For a lot of surgery, if you want to find out whether a procedure does any good, and you look up the research, it turns out that the VA did it. And some of the VA hospitals have the best results in the country.

In the private health care system, there are surgeons who rush everybody into surgery, whether they need it or not, because they make $10,000 or so for every procedure. In the VA hospital, they only perform surgery on those vets who actually need it.

I remember arguing with people over "Obamacare" when it was working it's way through Congress. My friends on the right side of the spectrum had a hard time believing that the VA ranked number one in terms of patient satisfaction, Medicare was ranked second, and private insurance/health care was last. Cross reference that with the amounts of money spent for each one of those programs and it seems obvious that government does a pretty good job of providing health care.

Patient satisfaction is a soft endpoint. Patients can't always tell whether their treatment did them more good than harm. Patients get unnecessary and devastating surgery (for prostate cancer, for example) and insist that the surgery saved their life.

The VA did scientific medicine. They were doing a lot of surgery, etc., and they wanted to find out whether the treatments were actually effective. When they did surgery for prostate cancer, colon cancer, or heart disease, did the surgery actually extend the pa

Although this may seem hard for conservatives to believe, there is such a thing as a government program that does its job well...

Yes, this is very true. However, these tend to be the exception and not the rule.

The VA works well because the customers are limited. The US Coast Guard does a great job because their mission scope is small (compared to the other service branches). But when the government gets into anything that has a wide scope, that's when things get inefficient.

But they can't help but wonder how many of these people would still require food stamps if they sold their car.

And once the money from the car runs out, they're right back on food stamps. Except that they now either lack a car, which makes it far less likely that they'll find a job, or drive an older car which gets worse mileage and higher maintenance costs.

Insisting that people exhaust all their resources before they are eligible for receiving help is understandable, but it's also stupid.

But they can't help but wonder how many of these people would still require food stamps if they sold their car.

Most of them. A static $20,000 can buy certain things, but is a poor investment vehicle. It is not larger enough to earn actual income (since even with good work, rate of return isn't usually above 12%, or a $2400/year salary). The best bet would be to start a small business, but the failure rate of small businesses is 85% in the first year. The time commitment would mean they would probably need to leave whatever job they have. They might be able to sidestep this by using the money as an infusion into

But when the government gets into anything that has a wide scope, that's when things get inefficient.

That's still not true. Take Social Security: They pay out to 61 million people spending less than 0.5% on overhead. Or Medicare, which despite its many flaws provides health care to 47 million people with less than 5% overhead (the private insurers were upset with the rule that they couldn't have higher than 20%).

Some possible answers to your "food stamps but nice cars" situation:1. They bought a car when they had a good job, but took out a loan to do it. If they sell the car, they lose the car, but the ent

VA is a lot better at providing care and managing costs than they were about 20 years ago. They also have a couple of built in advantages over other healthcare providers, a large part is that VA hospitals and physicians don't need malpractice insurance because they're immune from malpractice lawsuits.

1) A company is so good at satisfying it's customers that it eliminates it's competition by providing value in the marketplace.

2) A company gets special privileges and favours from the government, including increased regulations of it's own industry. Because when you're a huge corporation with billions in annual revenue and a team of lawyers and lobbyists on staff full-time, complying with regulations that cost mere millions per year is a small tax in exchange for an environment in which it's impossible for start-ups - who only have mere millions in start-up capital to begin with - to enter the market and compete with you. Best part, your team of lawyers and lobbyists can actually be the ones to suggest specific regulations to the politicians who are in your pocket, so you get rules that are cheap for you to follow but prohibitively expensive for others. And those regulations are extremely easy to pass because as well all know, corporations aren't regulated enough!

To translate into English: either companies are so awesome they become monopolies or the evil government forces monopolies from bad companies. Either way, it's the corporations awesomeness when it is good and the government's fault when it is bad.

That is, of course bullshit.

Large companies, like, for instance Intel and Microsoft that are in a dominant position can force out the competition using unfair business practices which mer

(As opposed to other government projects like the Amtrak Monopoly that should have been sold to Conrail or some other profitable rail company years ago.)

What's the point in turning a government monopoly into a corporate monopoly?

You're aware that there can't be two railway networks on a given territory, right?

Opening the trains to competition, okay, but the tracks are a natural monopoly, and should remain under control of the People, through an entity that is accountable to it. A corporate monopoly isn't accountable to the People.

Undoing a mod here, but you evidently haven't experienced the woe and misery of the UK rail network, where private companies compete with each other to see who can get away with fleecing the most out of customers, while the network itself falls apart.

Yeah, I read about that. My point still stands, though: the privatization of the network brought it to crumble. The fact that the Government ended up taking charge again in order to clean the mess actually consolidates my stand.

f handing manufacturing over to private business is the right strategy, then Obama was on the right track when he tried to move solar panel production out of government-funded research labs and into private business production. While initially funded with start-up grants, Solyndra was to eventually produce and sell solar panels in the open market. Of course, nobody could have predicted that China would flood the solar panel market with Chinese-government subsidized, Chinese-made panels that no open market firm could compete with.

Still, Obama was on the right track to try to move production into private industry rather than create another federal agency to make solar panels. If solar panel production had remained a federal agency project, the production likely would have continued long after the Chinese dumped their own panels on the market, costing U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars more as the federal-run production would continue even when the market was unprofitable. As it was, Solyndra folded, as any private business in an unprofitable market should, and the loss to the taxpayer was minimized. Moving producing to Solyndra was exactly the free-market strategy that everyone asks for, and was the right thing to do.

Amtrak is the opposite: passenger rail in the U.S. was private for years (well, quasi-private, if we ignore the land grants used to build the rail lines). But with the decline of intercity rail travel, the rail companies wanted to get out of the business, and Amtrak was set up to consolidate and operate a rump service, mainly focused on keeping rural areas connected. The biggest proponents were actually the private rail companies, who wanted a clean exit strategy (aka dump the mess on the government). Congressmen/Senators representing rural areas were also large proponents of the plan at the time, as they were worried about losing their town's stop.

Conrail has no interest in running passenger rail, since freight is far more profitable. There are more or less three options.

One is to shut it down entirely.

A second is to break it up, leaving it to states to operate local portions if they want. This is slowly being done to some extent on the funding side, as Amtrak cuts routes but has a program where they'll agree to keep operating a cut route if a state wants to pay for it. For example, the Vermonter in Vermont, and two routes in California are now operated by Amtrak as contractor on behalf of the respective states.

A third is the Scandinavian option, of a publicly funded but privately operated system: the government draws up what routes it wants operated and at what fares, and then opens it up for companies to bid how much of a subsidy they would need to operate the system as proposed (this is the arrangement under which, e.g., Movia operates the Copenhagen bus system).

LOL. Trying to repair your karma after spouting just the opposite sentiment yesterday in the other article's discussion? Today the government is good at kickstarting things yet yesterday you were telling us how terrible the government was. I see you also dropped your nonsense about the airlines since it was pointed out how they've been bailed out and are heavily subsidized.

The technical community may have invented the Internet, but it was the users who made it valuable by entrusting to it their time, money, and content. The users made a huge investment, and while that investment has paid off handsomely, let's not pretend that technologists invented all that valuable content.

I don't know of anyone that is arguing the government invented the full internet. The argument is that the internet would not exist in its current format if not for government (or, more accurately, government investment). And the format that it would exist in would not be even close to the current implementation in its usefulness and ability to spur the economy (efficiency boost).

The reason this argument started is that conservatives have been arguing that all productivity and innovation comes from capita

For the better part of two decades the Arpanet/Internet connected largely government and academia. The majority of users were, one way or the other, having some or all of their salaries and duties covered by the governments of several countries, though the US government was the biggest contributor.

The Internet was already well established by the time regular consumers started connecting to it in the early 1990s.

It looks like both WSJ and Gartner have both long since jumped the shark.
I was in university in the 80s. Anyone who was at large university in the 1980s would have been there to "watch the Internet happen", so to speak. BITNET, ARPANET, MILNET - how can these "reporters" (and yes, I used 'scare quotes' intentionally) hope to be taken seriously when there are plenty of people still alive who were there when the whole thing started? At least wait until most of us have died off before trying to rewrite history like that. Amateurs.

I think it is pretty obvious that ARPANet was the precursor to the internet and government funded research is responsible for the internet. But I do recall being sold home access to the internet as early as 1994, perhaps it was even earlier. By commercialization they must mean Al Gore's bill that allowed unsolicited advertising over the internet. Can anyone clarify this for me?

Were the merchants of internet connectivity in the early 1990's breaking some regulation?

My guess is that the article that was written in the Wall Street Journal might have had an ulterior motive but I cannot fathom why the author would want to plug for Xerox - could Xerox have offered some money to the author for such statements? Does Rupert have a vested interest in Xerox somehow?. I've noticed a disturbing trend over the last decade towards revisionist history. Some of this behavior is engaged in by politicians as well as leaders of racist and paramilitary cults. As an example, Iranian President Ahmadinejinad denies the Holocaust ever happened. Hitler used to have a saying that a lie repeated often enough becomes a truth and this is quite an accurate observation. This is particularly scary. I used to think that much of this was just poor journalism but now I'm not so sure. It is fairly widely known that the TCP/IP protocol was developed by DARPA.

My guess is that he was grasping for straws and Xerox PARC inventing Ethernet was the only remotely plausible thing he could come up with that actually originated in a private-sector research lab. There just weren't many corporations involved the early internet development, which was mainly a DARPA/NSF/university affair.

BBN did have a significant role, and is a private company. But its role was as an ARPANET contractor, not only funded on a grant but working in close collaboration with national labs, ARPA,

Gordon Crovitz lives in lower Manhattan around Wall Street. In fact, he lives near Zuccoti Park that Occupy Wall Street was camped out in.

During the occupation, Crovitz appeared in the local Community Board hearings to argue that OWS should be kicked out because they were making too much noise and disturbing his sleep. Most of the people who came before the Community Board supported OWS (First Amendment and all that), and the Community Board voted to support OWS and let them stay in the park, although they asked OWS to try to keep it quiet at night. Crovitz published a whiny editorial page essay complaining about it.

Like other public goods, it makes sense for the US government to pay for basic research. And in the case of the Internet, the US government did. Unfortunately, that's a tiny fraction of the overall federal budget.
In fact, while the US government paid for some of the research that formed the basis of the Internet, it also did a lot of damage. Packet communications, wireless communications, and digital online communications were being widely used by people such as ham operators and hobbyists for a long tim

The key point here is that government didn't make it what it is today. Up until the mid 1980s, the commercial activity on the internet wasn't allowed. And for the next 25-30 years (hopefully longer) taxation stayed out of the equation. Anyone recall a government proposal to charge people for every e-mail sent? Just imagine where we'd be if that had be crammed down our throats. Government produces nothing. If you want to understand the real issue, ask yourself how many monthly fees you pay for things you don't use. Really look at all your monthly bills and add up the fees. And look at "basic charge" for stuff you don't use. Say you go on vacation for a month (6 weeks if you live in Europe). Even if you turned off the main breaker, main water line, main gas line to your house, you still pay those basic charges every month even though you're not using the product. Now imagine that a group of people comes along and says to you "We're going to start billing you every month for stuff you don't need and will never use. You have extra money. Suck it up." And then a year later they come to you and say "Remember that thing we're billing you for that you never use? Yeah, well our costs have tripled." "But why should I keep paying for that?!" you scream. "Well, we can't fire all those people we hired because unemployment will go up. And we can't cut their salaries or benefits either." "But I didn't agree to hire all those people or give them a raise!" you yell. "Tough. Cough it up."

While we're giving the government credit for its role in the Internet, let's not forget to give them credit for IP laws, censorship, taxation, regulation, email snooping, surveillance, and all those other wonderful benefits we get from the government.

Most people misunderstand Gordon Crovitz. They all assume he want to show that Xerox paid for the internet, not the government. That is not true. His main purpose is to provide a reference. Now many people will quote Crovitz to claim that it was private companies that built the internet. Initially it will be of the form, "there are some people who hold the view that the internet was built primarily by private companies". Slowly as it gets retold, and referenced and cited and sliced and diced, it will eventu

His claim to have been affiliated with some committee that oversaw funding for ARPANet was correct. If Vint Cerf thinks he was an important early believer on the political side that's good enough for me.

Before Al Gore got involved, there was little to no commercial traffic over the Internet (you couldn't sell anything). This was back when the NSF(?) was involved. Afterwards, you could start selling and interest in the Internet increased rapidly.

Did Al Gore create the Internet? No. Was he one of the people primarily responsible for making it what it is today? Yes.

He also advocated publicly for it, which went a bit beyond just putting his name on a Senate bill. He really believed in its potential and tried to make others aware of it. He deserves more credit than he gets, in any case.

Why? There are thousands of potential technologies that never get the funding they need to get off the ground. Those that get substantial financial backing frequently do get off the ground. The government is one of the primary means by which technologies can get the seed money they need. Politicians run the government. Ergo...

For one thing, I doubt his vote was the deciding vote on the issue. It is impossible to quantify how much his advocacy increased the bill's vote count.

I suspect it would be more appropriate to say it's impossible for you to believe that Al Gore's advocacy helped. Frankly, the people who aught to know are convinced he played an important role. The accounts I've read all indicate that Gore spent a lot of time and energy making sure that bill passed. That's good enough for me, however, if you're a political weenie who can't give credit where credit is due, you might come to a different conclusion.

There wouldn't have been a vote without his advocacy. He got it to the voting stage.

As for government involvement crowding out private investment. That's an easily testable hypothesis. There are societies that spend a lot of government directed research and societies that spend little. The two tend to positively correlate not negatively correlate.

Even if the bill never existed, there is a real business incentive to invest research in science that can be used to increase worker productivity.

It was pretty unclear at the time that the internet was going to be a worker productivity tool, other than in marketing and advertising. Further there are lots of science ideas which might increase labor productivity not getting funding. So I think its fair to say the private market isn't funding all, most or even a substantial fraction of potential areas.

He was one of several sponsors of the Senate bill that made the Internet more available to the general public.

It should be noted that Al Gore Jr.'s father, (Al Gore, Sr.:), was instrumental in getting the interstate highway system build in the US. Once that was established, it was intrumental in allowing shipping (by truck) to become easier.. Before the IS system, you had small roads (like the famous Route 66): it was common to receive Florida oranges as a Christmas gift in NYC because this was a big deal: they had come all the way from Florida! The interstate system helped kickstart commerce because you were no l

Which, funnily enough, is almost exactly what he said. People love to misremember what he said, and then hold them accountable for what they wish he said.

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.

Vint Cerf and Bob Khan (who know something about Internet history) had this to say:

"No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President."

and

"as far back as the 1970s, Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship [...] the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication."

Which, funnily enough, is almost exactly what he said. People love to misremember what he said, and then hold them accountable for what they wish he said.

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.

I was actually watching that interview when he said that, and I nearly lost a mouthful of soda. He claimed to have created the internet. Read what you pasted above. I agree that he directed funding and supported it, but he did not create it.

And note that "initiative" in the statement above cannot be a "congressional initiative" because it's part of the idiomatic phrase "took the initiative". One cannot "take" a congressional initiative.

I read what I posted. He wrote the High Performance Computing Act [wikipedia.org], also known as the "Gore bill". It built off ARPANET and NSFnet towards a more general-purpose general-availability fast network. It also included funding for the NCSA, which used it to write Mosaic, which was really the jumping-off point of the Internet as we know it today. Marc Andreessen left NCSA to found Netscape, and as they say the rest is history.

The Internet is not NSFNet nor ARPANET. It's a logical evolution of those, and used many of the same technologies, but like most technical people you forget that there's more to an idea than simply the technology. Al Gore really was the guy who took the idea of a internetwork, accessible to all and used for everything, and made it a reality. Were it not for his efforts, there would still be internetworks, but they may very well not be general-utility and public-access. We might even have web browsers, but there wouldn't have been any money in writing them for a long, long time. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, and the government put the egg in the incubator on spec. A perfect example of government done right, really - which is of course why the Murdoch Street Journal ran the article.

Describing his role as congressman, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who played key roles in the development of the Internet and TCP/IP write:

"He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship. Though easily forgotten, now, at the time this was an unproven and controversial concept. Our work on the Internet started in 1973 and was based on even earlier work that took place in the mid-late 1960s. But the Internet, as
we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still
in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided
intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential
benefits of high speed computing and communication. As an example, he
sponsored hearings on how advanced technologies might be put to use in
areas like coordinating the response of government agencies to natural
disasters and other crises."

They go on to discuss the important contributions he made as Senator and Vice President.

This thing about some factions in the US hating everything the government does is incomprehensible in Europe. Some things a government does are good and some are bad but a conviction that everything must be either good or bad is obviously the sign of a failed intellect. How did your politics become so meaningless and manipulable by marketing exercises? Is it just the way media has become so powerful or is it that Americans have become stupid?

To my mind there are some human enterprises that would benefit from government funding. Finding drugs or vaccines to cure chronic diseases of the poor or gene patents would be a good start as both these areas are in markets with poor linkage to externalities. Fundamental research with no obvious application to commerce is another.

There are plenty of things governments are not very good at doing. Making things and delivering them to customers is one.

It is not at all surprising that the Government had a large role in creating the internet. A private enterprise would have invented something that could make much more money using the business models of the time. There wouldn't be any of this nonsense about allowing so much traffic that doesn't result in direct monetary transactions.

This is especially puzzling since the "conservative faction" here was founded with "Big Government" in mind. The GOP is the original part of "lets have the government build some roads" so we can make more money.

The Internet is exactly the kind of "big infastructure" the original Republicans wanted to encourage.

I think it's rather misguided to characterize early Republicans in such a way. The Republican Party was founded to offer a stronger abolitionist response to the power vacuum left by the implosion of the Whig Party and North/South divisions within the Democratic Party. That it would end up advocating 'big government infrastructure' was incidental and wholly predicated on the fact that its rise was concurrent with the Civil War. Those circumstances necessitated a consolidation of Federal power as well as the

Some states are raising taxes because of their long unfunded pension liabilities, which were used to cook the books. See the commercial version of this: United Airlines, for one

A few municipal governments are indeed filing Chapter 9s. Uniformly, these filings are as a result of long-term mayor vs city council funding issues.

Big infrastructure is not dead for now, and it never was. Let's kill the meme that spending is bad: it can do lots of good if there's a realistic expectation of an outcome, rather than peeing it down a rathole.

Yes, you might need to raise revenues through reasonable taxation: a fair share.

conviction that everything must be either good or bad is obviously the sign of a failed intellect. How did your politics become so meaningless and manipulable by marketing exercises? Is it just the way media has become so powerful or is it that Americans have become stupid?

It's not an "or" question, both are true.

Of course that's generalizing; not all Americans are so easily manipulated, but are moderates/centrists who can see two (or more) sides of an issue and aren't blinded by partisanship. Unfortunately, that means they're "fence-sitters", "indecisive", "flip-floppers" and other derogatory terms to ideologues on both sides.

The government is just an extension of people who want to have a level playing field including the roads and bridges and such created and maintained so society can continue their daily business.

That's a lovely, romantic idea, but if you look at what government does today it spends dramatically more of our tax money to provide windfalls for corporations than it does on anything actually positive. Of course, I say this as a resident of a state whose roads are failing partly because we pay more to the federal government than we get back. California is pretty tired of bankrolling bullshit that we can't afford for other states that contribute less. Meanwhile, I'm pretty tired of tax money being used to

The government is just an extension of people?
I don't think the NSA/DIA was thinking of "people" when they rolled out COINS (Community On-line Intelligence System) from around 1965/70
The US gov knew data storage was the future and saw the issues most of the West was having with massive amounts of secret data entry.
The US gov understood their communications system, their digital data moving on their networks.
The rest of the world was still playing with digital entry of old physical card indexes - and no

This is the sentiment that I have a very hard time understanding. It is almost like you believe you are fighting against some sort of God or Supreme being that is "the government." I guess that makes sense, since conservatives actually worship the free market like a God (or a false idol - ironic that is the religious conservatives doing that). That is why they are always talking about the "invisible hand of the market" (God's invisible hand? Maybe they believe that God actually controls the free market)

Who else would invent something designed to spread viruses, botnets and prn? Who else would create a monopoly service with no accountability? Who else would create something to keep me paying over and over again for the same software? Who else would create a communications network that is so unsecure that it took a decade to figure out how to safely use it for simple payment transactions (and even now isn't all that safe).

Fair enough, and in support of the point I was trying to make, which was the government didn't create the Internet to spread viruses et al.

They didn't create it for that purpose, but because they didn't create it in a commercial environment and let it grow and compete, they also didn't create it to prevent viruses and botnets. They built it with all the scrutiny and detail of an academic project, not the scrutiny and detail of a commercial product.

they didn't create it in a commercial environment and let it grow and compete,

Are you lying or ignorant? I'm inclined to think that it's a healthy mixture of both.

There were many competitors to the internet, such as UUCP, BITNET, X.25, Minitel, CYCLADES, Frame Relay, plesichronus POTS, BBSs and so on. The internet won in the face of stiff competition. Hell, BITNET was still growing in the early 90's and UUCP was still pretty popular.

They built it with all the scrutiny and detail of an academic project, not

Ok, I'm confused. Was there so much competition that an internet would have been built and deployed with or without the government, or were there so few other competitors that nothing would have happened without the government?

Sometimes the government does provide the best solution for something. It's not impossible. It's just that when government doesn't provide the best solution we usually end up paying for it long after it is clear it isn't the best solution.

I still think the solution would have been better had it been created by someone else. I don't say this because the initial technology would have been better - but because the continuing need for improvement. With the internet, no one is accountable for viruses. Ha

Perhaps it would have been better to keep the internet a government run system only for a small group of users instead of opening it up to everyone. Then the competing networks would have been free to borrow technology from the government's system while at the same time developing their own and competing with each other for safe secure computing, and the government's system with its small user-base would be safer from those who would misuse it.

The eagerness for private companies to jump on the Internet to market to end-users is historical fact. Given such demand, why did not private companies create such a secure and accountable internet? Were the benefits not so obvious? There were, and are, privately-managed internets connecting companies (been there, done that, in the late '90's). The free market operated, just not like you expected, because "free marketers" usually fail to take into account tha

The eagerness for private companies to jump on the Internet to market to end-users is historical fact. Given such demand, why did not private companies create such a secure and accountable internet? Were the benefits not so obvious?

Doing it right takes time, and it usually takes trial-and-error. In most new industries there are quite a few attempts that fail, sometimes because the technology and the market aren't ready yet, sometimes because the because a company doesn't do things right.

There were, and are, privately-managed internets connecting companies (been there, done that, in the late '90's). The free market operated, just not like you expected, because "free marketers" usually fail to take into account that land-lines require laying cable on/in/over public lands, which requires franchise, which requires scale, which led to tiers of service providers and ISPs.

Remember modems? Computers can actually talk on phone lines. Part of the build up of technology is to use what's there. As demand increased the cooperation with government needed for new cable in public and private lands would have come - and it wo

I always figured it had to be the government. Who else would invent something designed to spread viruses, botnets and prn?

Microsoft Windows and Novell network equipment in computer labs were doing this long before they got hooked up to the internet.

Who else would create a monopoly service with no accountability?

Again, Microsoft, to name one. Government tried breaking that monopoly up by holding them accountable to antitrust laws and fair business dealings, the next government halted that effort in its tracks.

Who else would create something to keep me paying over and over again for the same software?

You mean like annual fees and software "upgrade assurance" for various software and services, including Windows at the corporate level? I'm not even sure what "software" you're talking